In a standard English auction participants keep on bidding until one person is left with an unambiguously highest offer.
In a Dutch auction, which is used to sell tulips, the auctioneer starts out with a high price and keeps on lowering it until someone bites. The auction then ends.
A large literature considers the conditions under which these two approaches yield the same expected revenue.
In terms of dating, if you run an English auction you go out with many people, if not simultaneously then relatively closely bunched in time, and you stick with the one who offers the most. If you run a Dutch auction you signal clearly your standards (lowering the standards over time if need be), and stick with the first person who bites.
I believe that strongly Christian women are more likely to run a Dutch auction. Perhaps non-religious women are more likely to run Dutch auctions as they get older.
The economics literature suggests that if bidders are risk-averse, the Dutch auction is more likely to yield higher revenue (in the limiting case, grab quickly any positive consumer surplus, before it goes away). Alternatively, if the seller thinks that bidders would be more enthusiastic if they saw each other’s ongoing bids, this tends to encourage an English auction. In other words, hidden but not too hidden qualities encourage English auctions.
Here are other kinds of auctions.
I think that a dutch auction is not necessarily better nor more commonly used in the population of strongly Christian women. Christians I feel would use either method. I feel that the English way, going on many dates and then deciding is less religious than any because it shows judging and does not seem to follow Christian values. There are opportunity costs for all of the above types of auctions. Some auctions do not make as much money but at the same time, people may find the love of their life. All of the above auctions could be effective in different cases.
That solution is the one that maximizes the probability of finding the absolutely best candidate, the “soul mate.”
even if no one “uses these strategies consciously to choose a mate”, we can still increase our understanding by looking at this model for behavior. no one consciously thinks about demand and supply curves when they are looking at peaches in a grocery store–but if the peaches are on sale they are still going to sell more.
Courtship is how the “anti-daters” put it themselves.
Definitely seen more of the Dutch Auction type behavior among Christian women. Couldn’t you argue that it’s built-in? There’s a huge hang-up on being monogamous and divorce is a huge failure (at this point, many believe that you only get one chance at marriage–”no seconds” can be justified in the good book).
“While not denying my own bias towards risk-aversion, wouldn’t you expect nearly everyone to be at least somewhat risk-averse, and therefore to see something a Dutch Auction system prevail here, regardless of religion?”
For those whose religious beliefs (or lack thereof) don’t prohibit premarital sex, an English auction offers fun in the process, which the Dutch doesn’t.
Christian dating is a subject pretty near and dear to my heart, and from what I’ve seen there are some substantial inefficiencies going on in the market. First, the limited monopolies of most churches (most churches I’ve been to have had a handful of singles scattered across their memberships of whom any new single might only find a few potential dating partners). Second are age related effects, granted this was somewhat overstated by where I was for my early 20s but at most churches there was a large lack of 20 somethings both single and married (it seems like many people wander and return with a family). Finally, everyone on both sides has very high standards and is very concerned about leading anyone on if they don’t meet those standards. Any game theorists want to come up with something more complex than a prisoner’s dilemna?
It’s odd that such a suboptimal situation has persisted as long as it has.
Nelsonal: Been there, done that. Used eHarmony; just celebrated our 1st wedding anniversary. Not necessarily the perfect solution, but it’s worked nicely for us.
But there’s clearly some wisdom in sampling until you have a reasonable picture of the distribution, whether you can massage the situation into a nice mathematical model or not. And that’s embedded into conventional wisdom on dating and relationships, right? Marrying your highschool sweetheart is rare for a good reason–usually, if you’ve only dated people in highschool, you don’t have much sense of what else is out there, and you may be making a bad decision in the sense of marrying someone with little in common with you.
Rules of engagement in dating probably affect this only in limited ways. If you’re not willing to have premarital sex, or at least come rather close, you’re not going to discover sexual compatibility issues. If you spend all your time together either in bars or having sex, you probably won’t find out whether you share a lot of underlying beliefs, or other interests. If you date for a short time, you probably won’t see each other in a wide variety of circumstances that might be important for a marriage–how well does he handle it when you’re up to your eyebrows in work and can’t find time to do anything together for a couple weeks?
Barkley: For some reason, having never heard of it, I find the idea of a “dual Dutch auction” rather fascinating. I rather suspect that women in most cultures (perhaps all in which they have legal status) would not be terribly enticed by the idea of bundling here, but the world does continue to amaze.
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